One must give credit where credit is due: Israel, by behaving with the strategic subtlety of a chainsaw in a porcelain museum, has achieved what diplomats, clerics, monarchs, generals, and think-tank acrobats spent decades failing to accomplish. It has helped bury the old Sunni–Shia melodrama as the organizing principle of West Asian politics, and it has made the American “security umbrella” look less like an umbrella than a very expensive lightning rod.

This is no small accomplishment.

For years, the region was instructed to understand itself through sectarian grammar. Riyadh and Tehran were not merely rival capitals; they were presented as metaphysical opposites, civilizational antagonists, eternal enemies locked in theological combat.

For years, the region was instructed to understand itself through sectarian grammar. Riyadh and Tehran were not merely rival capitals; they were presented as metaphysical opposites, civilizational antagonists, eternal enemies locked in theological combat.

Every battlefield was translated into sectarian prose. Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq: all were reduced to the lazy vocabulary of Sunni versus Shia, as though history itself had been outsourced to cable-news interns and intelligence cut-outs.

Then came reality, that most impolite guest.

China began the correction in 2023 by brokering the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, assisted by the quieter groundwork of Iraq and Oman. Russia, too, contributed by helping normalize the idea that regional actors could speak across blocs without first asking permission from Washington’s imperial reception desk. But Israel, with its characteristic gift for turning every tactical victory into a strategic ulcer, has completed the process. Its rampage across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran’s orbit has reminded the region that the primary contradiction is not sectarian identity. It is imperial architecture. It is Zionist violence. It is the American security order that protects both while charging its clients premium rates for the privilege of being endangered.

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Whatever one thinks of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt, or any of the regimes presently rearranging the furniture of........

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